Advancing Fire

Advancing Fire is an Italian board game company specialised in tactical games, compatible with the Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) system. Advancing Fire has always believed in combining tactical wargames with military history books.

Military history books sometimes have the problem of providing a partial view of the actions narrated, particularly when they fail to fully develop details such as the incidence of terrain, the orders of battle of lower-level units, the resources they could actually rely on in the battlefield and the power relations generated by the various weapons and tactics on the ground. Faced with this lack of information and a place to experience it through simulations, the keen reader may lose interest in reading and in the subject in general.

The tactical wargame is a military simulation at the level of a single squad (5-10 men), single vehicle and single gun that is played on a historical map. The most successful system for World War II settings is Advanced Squad Leader, which allows the game to be played on grids of hexagons each representing a width of 40 metres. It differs from strategic and operational wargames by the smaller scale in which the simulation is developed. Larger scale wargames do not add much to the depth of a good military history book. When the level rises from battalion/regiment upwards the dynamics given by endowments/terrain/tactics are much less representable in detail. The added value (or disadvantage) given by hills, groups of houses, trenches within a few hundred metres represented in the tactical game have often made the difference in many important battles. The tactical wargame is therefore the only one among simulations to provide an in-depth and complementary key to the Military History book.

The physical form of a tactical wargame is an all paper and cardboard product, with a size typical of publishing, usually about 30 cm high and 4-8 cm thick, perfectly storable in a bookcase. Advancing Fire wargames come with an international barcode. Tactical simulations in the ASL system, and ours in particular, can be played solo (without an opponent), particularly for study, and are also 100% “playable” online for free, on the VASSAL/VASL servers, so no on-site opponent is required to use them, although the live experience remains the most exciting. The VASSAL/VASL servers have an average presence of 50 players online 24 hours a day, and it is therefore also easy to find new people with whom to organise a simulation.

In some ways a good tactical wargame can be considered a source of information and insight on a par with a book. It provides an accurate representation to scale of the battlefield, including fortifications and geographical features present on the days when it took place, based on the careful study of photographs including aerial reconnaissance, selected from historical ones in the main national archives. In addition, it provides the development of military units on the ground through counters drawn with the main features (squads, guns, vehicles). A good tactical wargame is an even better source of information and insight when developed in close collaboration with the best military history authors. We at Advancing Fire first started this process of teaming up with world-class authors by putting together a series of games that currently includes ‘Prokhorovka!’ developed with bestselling author Christopher Lawrence, ‘Orsogna’ made in collaboration with the well-known New Zealand author Jeffrey Plowman and are in preparation and will be released by 2025 “Zámoly” developed with Norbert Szamveber and ‘Brevity-Battleaxe’ with British author Julian Shales. A second game on Kursk called “The Battle of Tolstoye Woods”, on the Grossdeutschland side of the operation, also developed in collaboration with Lawrence, is planned for release in 2026 to coincide with the release of this author's next book of the same name. Other planned titles are still being evaluated; we expect to reach 12 titles within five years. Our wargames include scenarios that are useful for simulating large-scale actions as well as scenarios that focus on key actions of smaller battles that can be executed in a short time.

- The Advancing Fire Team

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Join us on Facebook